hat tip katzenjammer and _________ for kitten and undulating disc, respectively (pre-modification)
May 2012
"TipTop One Two"
"TipTop One Two" [mp3 removed]
Rather dorky, vintage videogame-like themes made with a modular monosynth. Sounds kind of 8-Bit but this is analog-recorded-to-24-Bit all the way.
The way it works is X amount of time to make a patch (with knobs and cables) that sounds interesting and then back to the computer to write MIDI notes that exploit the patch in some way. Then record and in the case of "One" here, overtrack.
"TipTop Three"
"TipTop Three" [mp3 removed]
Drum & bass version of two mono-synth themes (including the "Sonar Death Ray 2" riff).
Spartan Workout Video
Was thinking about a "It's Only Humanist"-style essay that considers the movie 300 as the dark side of digital creatives' supposed fascination with all things ancient and Greek. The pitch would go something like
300 reflects young filmmakers' yearning for manly virtue and ancient rituals of violence in the disconnected, affectless time of the Internet. The Spartans' CGI abs and pecs conjure a warrior cult of the body, in contrast to the aestheticized holistic beauty favored by the Athenians: free-floating signifiers of sweaty buffness but also a grotesque cyborg "skinning" of the human form.
Unfortunately writing this would entail watching 300 in its entirety.
sketch_i7a
An earlier, more "abstract" version of this drawing.
MSPaintbrush, MSPaint (Windows 7), some lousy Photoshop brushes.
This started as a netbook drawing made in MSPaint7 while sitting in a Starbucks in Soho waiting for E.P.; I kept adding to it.
Put the word abstract in scare quotes because these brushes and textures are pure representation at this point. Someone's digital picture of what airbrush or crayon look like and how those behave on certain pictures of surfaces.
We could really use some more theory starting from where we left off with "the whole abstraction/representation thing" in painting (as one gallery art critic sneeringly put it near the end of that cycle) and what's been happening with revived abstract painting on phones, blogs, etc. People are drifting around without a rudder on a sea of these brainless tech-y symbols. We don't particularly need help from anyone who starts from the premise that painting is a culture of bourgeois decoration, so no thank you to some of the critics coming out of SAIC recently. Ry David Bradley, in an essay examining the role of novelty in contemporary art, finds a useful (as in problem-rich) model in three German painters (Polke, Oehlen, Berresheim) who collectively make a transition from paint to pixels:
Each uses painting as a method of creating an image to mimic or incorporate other more commercial or industrial methods as a way of critiquing them, even historicizing them – by orchestrating the clash so that each method of image creation plays off against its other, exposing novelty whilst espousing history. If anything changed at all between the works of these artists, it was not far from the model. Each remained broadly concerned with paint against industry, with the tradition of making pictures against the industrial way of making them.
MSPaint country, though, is a quagmire of irony, ignorance and misunderstanding. How much is real? A joke? Intentional ineptness? Kitsch? What is good: Tension? Contradiction? Using one program to investigate another? This leads to other clashes: Apple vs Windows, "old school" bitmap imagery vs FX bells and whistles, geeks vs Greeks. Do we need bridges from Polke, et al to people working with almost no reference to the showing physical objects in galleries? Are there any good reasons for continuing to refer to painted abstraction as opposed to "machine abstraction"?